In-class design study—Public transit development

Due 2023-10-03, 11:59pm EST 8pts 48min

Please ask any questions about this assignment in class, or later today on Slack.

You will work with other students on this assignment.

Table of Contents

• Change Log
• Aim of the assignment
• Instructions
  • Setup
  • Interview notes
  • Tasks
  • Individual sketching
  • Joint sketching
• Submission instructions
• Grading rubric

Change Log

• N/A.

Aim of the assignment

In your careers you may need to be able to develop a visualization that will actually solve a target user’s problem. In this assignment, you will levergage the practice you got conducting an interview and analyzing the target user’s tasks & goals to create a task abstraction. Using the abstraction, you will design a visualization tool that can help solve their problem.

Instructions

Throughout this assignment, you are welcome to ask the teaching staff for help or feedback.

Setup

2 min

1. Break into the same groups of ~3 people you were working with for the interview and task abstraction steps.
2. Start writing a document in your favorite collaborative word processor / document preparation system (i.e. Google Docs, Office 365, Overleaf), with In-class design study—Public transit development as the title and the names of the group members listed right below it.

Interview notes

2 min

You had practiced interviewing a simulated transportation engineer.

1. Create a new section titled Interview notes.
2. Paste the notes from your interview here.

Tasks

10 min

1. Create a page break so you start on a new page.
2. Write Tasks as a section heading.

3. Discuss the user tasks and goals you had abstracted using the taxonomy from VAD (refer to Fig. 3.1). Create a table in this section to organize them. You may need to revisit the tasks to categorize them. Follow this outline:

   Task ID#	Domain Task	Analytic Task (low-level, “query”)	Search Task (mid-level)	Analyze Task (high-level)
   1	Examining a phylogenetic tree, which species are classified as mammals?	Filter	Locate	Present
   …	…	…	…	…

   • First, fill-in the “Domain” task column which represents all the tasks your user wants to accomplish with the data/visualization. Rank the tasks from most to least important, top to bottom.
   • Next, translate these domain tasks into computer science terminology by identifying what low-, mid-, and/or high-level tasks it represents. Make sure to fill in each cell of the table! The original paper (Brehmer and Munzner, 2013) specifies that “Complete task descriptions … must include nodes from all three parts of this typology.”

   Reminder: If you have any questions about whether you’re performing the task abstraction correctly, ask the teaching staff to review them for you before you move on.

4. Reorder the tasks and rank them by decreasing priority.

Individual sketching

17 min

1. Create a page break so you start on a new page.
2. Write Individual sketches as a section heading.
3. Create a subsection for each member of the group using their name as the subsection heading.
4. Individually—and on paper—create several low-fidelity sketches of possible visualizations that can address the abstract tasks. Each student should have at least 3 sketches.
5. Photograph the sketches and add them to their authors’ subsections.

Joint sketching

17 min

1. Create a page break so you start on a new page.
2. Write Joint sketch as a section heading.
3. Create one polished high-fidelity visualization sketch that uses the best components you came up with in the individual sketching. If there are interactive components, you can create a storyboard and/or use annotations to describe what changes and how.
4. Add the final sketch to this section.
5. Write the ranked tasks the visualization would support directly below the sketch.

Submission instructions

One person from the group should create a PDF from your document and ensure it contains everything required for the 4 parts. They should then submit it as a single PDF to the assignment In-class design study—Public transit development on GradeScope.

Note: Use Gradescope’s Group Members tab to add the members of your group to your submission.

Note: Use GradeScope’s “tagging” interface to associate the pages of the PDF with their associated questions of the rubric.

Grading rubric

Like usual, the visualizations should follow our the best practices and everything you’ve learned in class up to this point. E.g., include axis labels, appropriate scales, titles, legends, annotations, be neat and clean (not cluttered). Points will be deducted for poor quality or confusing visualizations. Likewise, points will be deducted for spelling and grammar mistakes or not following the directions.

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